“We reverse engineered the low-level assembly sorting algorithms discovered by AlphaDev for sort 3, sort 4 and sort 5 to C++ and discovered that our sort implementations led to improvements of up to 70% for sequences of a length of five and roughly 1.7% for sequences exceeding 250,000 elements.”
The 70% figure is for sorting five numbers. On anything over 250,000 elements the gain is 1.7%. DeepMind framed the search as a single-player game over assembly instructions and got the result merged into LLVM’s C++ sort library. A real contribution, sized like a compiler peephole, sold like a breakthrough in algorithms.